Below are student suggestions for resources to use in CUNY classrooms to teach about events in Ferguson, MO. These answers were compiled by Liz Goetz.
Hilarie Ashton: I’d love to talk about #FergusonSyllabus and see what folks are doing in their classrooms. I happened to be teaching Patti Smith already yesterday, so it was a nice opportunity to play “People Have the Power.” One of my students said she didn’t think her other professors would’ve spent time talking about Ferguson, which deeply saddens me.
I wanted to share something a friend who teaches in Bk Heights is doing with her students. She also promised me “an incredible list of education resources” from the school librarian – I’ll share them when I get them.
And if people haven’t seen it yet, there’s also this amazingly gargantuan list.
Hil again: Also, I just came across this post – not too many concrete ideas, but the Baldwin quote is good, and I like some of the considerations of how to frame the discussion and how to make students re-conceptualize their normal.
Liz Goetz: http://zinnedproject.org/2014/11/teaching-about-ferguson/ looks like it might be useful for lesson plan ideas.
Audre Lorde’s poem “Power”
Danez Smith’s “not an elegy for Mike Brown” includes the lines “once, a white girl/ was kidnapped & that’s the Trojan war./ later, up the block, Troy got shot/ & that was Tuesday” — also seems cool because it’s clearly not canonical, and, as seen in the title, clearly references Brown/Ferguson.
Scroll to Walker’s October 2014 poem “Gather,” which she presents in both English and Spanish. Just as Smith above explicitly references the Brown shooting, Walker discusses the NYPD’s strangling of Eric Garner in no obscure terms.
I also think I’m going to teach Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Riot” next week
Michael Rumore: Langston Hughes’ “Harlem”
Lynne Beckenstein: my class watched Giuliani’s racist rant about Ferguson and read Ta-Nehisi Coate’s satire of said rant.
Maggie Galvan: Another potential short text that gives a longer look at historical context: Barbara Smith, “The Rodney King Verdict,” pp. 102-105 in her essay collection, The Truth that Never Hurts
Text online here. Evocative quote: “Quiet as it’s kept, whether we are ‘rioting’ or not, most African Americans live every day with greater or lesser amounts of rage toward white people and the system that gives them the power and privilege to decimate our lives. I know I do.”
Allen Strouse: In my History of the English Language course, students have been checking out different versions of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae (with translations in Old English, Middle English, Anglo-Norman, Early Modern English, and Modern English). Last week (the day after the grand jury decision) we discussed an excerpt from Queen Elizabeth I’s translation of the Boethius. The original work is about a man trying to find philosophical consolation in the midst of a corrupt society ruled by a despotic government in a hopelessly fallen world. Our discussion focused on the particular features of Boethius’s unique, Neo-Platonist/Catholic stoicism that made it acceptable and perhaps consoling to the Protestant Elizabeth. In other words, we were thinking about how canonical works can be (re)read by later generations in order to help us find meaning in life during troublesome times. We made no explicit mention of Ferguson, but the connections were obvious. (Frankly I think it’s a bummer that anyone would think that there has to be a choice between hot-button political current events and “a stodgy definition of literature.”)
Charlotte Thurston: Thank you for these resources, everyone. This is maybe somewhat roundabout, but…this past week and a half I’ve been teaching Othello, and we’ve been discussing the kinds of prejudices and stereotypes the play puts forth. On the Serial podcast last week (Episode 10), at about the 8-15 minute mark, Sarah Koenig starts talking about anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias present in the courtroom for Adnan Syed and even in “consultant” documents for the police, including assumptions about Pakistani men and honor killings (namely, that the two somehow “naturally” go together). I played this for them at the start of last class, and though the podcast’s content is not directly about Ferguson and police brutality, I invited them to also bring up their thoughts and contributions surrounding race and police brutality. I wanted them to think about these things in light of themes in the play itself involving how deep-set prejudices and stereotypes define and characterize how people are seen in the world and how they see themselves. They had many thoughtful insights into how hearsay slips into fact for people, how news can use shorthand and key words to shape our ideas of a person, a group of people, various events. Some people in the class brought up people they knew personally who had been killed, who were black, and who were characterized after their deaths by the marijuana they still had in their system.
